Task for Rajapakse, Prabhakaran

As Sri Lanka spirals violently downwards, both the Colombo government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) prefer to project themselves as victims of a war forced upon them. In all the incidents of the past weeks, including the claymore mine attack on a civilian bus in Kebbitigollawa, the gruesome murder of a Tamil family in Mannar District on 8 June, the shocking killing of civilians in Jaffna District, and the bombing of a church compound in the north, the government and LTTE accused each other of outrages while denying their own culpability.

The horrific bus bombing, where an unprecedented number of civilians died or were wounded, could have been the LTTE's way of retaliating for the difficulties in which it finds itself. The organisation is bitter at the ban slapped on it by the European Union, which has made it an outcast in the world's most influential countries. Some of the Tamil Tigers' leading cadres have been killed in recent weeks by subversive forces of which the government denies having any knowledge, and a large number of pro-LTTE civilians have also been killed in brutal fashion.